


Bruised to Completion

by NoelleAngelFyre



Series: 2nd Time Around (TMNT 2014) [9]
Category: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - All Media Types
Genre: Character Backgrounds, Cuddling in Aftermath, Dysfunctional Relationships, F/M, First Time Love Scene, Love Confessions, Movie References (TMNT 2014), Turtle-Human Relationships, Vulnerability, body image issues, dysfunctional romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-26
Updated: 2016-03-26
Packaged: 2018-05-29 07:11:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6364429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NoelleAngelFyre/pseuds/NoelleAngelFyre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I don’t know what the hell we’ve got between us.” He says, “Could be something special; could be as romantic as an addict needing a fix.  Whatever it is, it blows my mind every time we’re together, it drives me crazy when we’re not, and I’ve been flat on my face in it and because of it enough times that I’ll just say I’m crazy about you—might even be in love with you—because right about now, it’s as close to making sense of it as I can get.  And it feels pretty damn close to the truth.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bruised to Completion

**Author's Note:**

> Hard as I tried, I just couldn't find a place in the next full-length segment of "2nd Time Around" to house this part. So I just gave Raph and Karai their own slot in the series. Rated M for mentions of violence and sexual content.

“See something you like?”

Sultry and seductive isn’t Raph’s game. She knows it, and he knows it even better. He’s a heavy-hitter, a one-man army of iron will, bruising fists, an inferno of solid, unadulterated masculinity. He’s a cheeky quip here and there, a hefty helping of sarcasm and unfiltered insults. He’s the hulking vision you don’t want to come across in a dark alley: the one who hits first, breaks half the bones in your body, and then asks questions. He’s an uncut diamond half-buried in dirt and grime, a hair-trigger temper ready to light the fuse on gunpowder. He’s no Don Juan or bare-chested paramour stepping free of a tawdry romance novel to sweep fair lady off her feet.

But tonight, when he asks the question, smirking shamelessly, it’s because she’s staring. And she’s staring _hard_.

Why tonight, she has no idea and isn’t bothered to care. Tonight just happens to be the one her eyes have drifted, casually at first, then lock in place and render themselves incapable of looking away. She was guilty of it earlier, when a late-night street fight with two dozen Purple Dragons managed to go downhill in a flaming handbasket with no warning. Raphael was, once again, the first one to throw a punch, and that’s when she started staring. With every kick thrown and every time his fists flew left and right, knocking gangbangers off their feet and sending his fair share flying into the alley, she stared. When a muscle-bound ape caught her off-guard with a plank of rotted wood across the back and flattened her to the pavement, then he went flying into a brick wall while Raphael’s towering mass stood guard over her against a shower of bullets raining down on them for nearly five minutes, she stared long and hard. When sirens broke the night air, gangsters scattered like cockroaches, and Raphael hoisted her over his shell before disappearing to the rooftops, she stared at the expense of breathing, because breathing was hardly as important as keeping her eyes fixed on him. Right here, right now, while Raphael is seated across the room, dealing with a few scrapes and battered limbs like they’re paper cuts, she continues to stare. She looks, she stares, and she _sees_.

She sees dark shadows interrupting scaled green flesh; the pale, almost mint-toned lines from scars scattered across his arms and chest; the thick lines from which his muscles are etched. She sees the glistening sheen of sweat slicked across limbs and torso alike. She sees the defined lines of his jaw, then the thin upward curve of his smirk, and finally stumbles into the dark pools of his eyes. She stares, she sees, and she feels a very distinct heat creeping across her skin. Is she blushing? She must be, because his smirk is growing by the second.

“If you like what you see, Sunshine,” he continues, as though her silence gave permission for him to keep talking, “do something about it.”

Finally, she snaps free of her little reverie. “Do you even know what that means?” her arms fold neatly across her chest, eyebrows cocked. She needs attitude as a shield now, protecting her from doing something exceptionally stupid—or worse yet, convincing herself that it’s _not_ stupid when it really, _really_ is.

The amusement drops from his expression like dead weight, and a tight scowl replaces it. “I ain’t a kid, Karai.” He retorts, and when he almost never uses her given name, it stings especially to hear him use such a biting tone. “Yeah, I _know what it means_.”

She’s grateful that he looks away, that he busies himself again with a haphazard patch job, because the spark of anger doesn’t turn her off, or push her away. It does the exact opposite.

The question itself was both imbecilic and necessary. _Imbecilic_ , because she could never assume he and his siblings have lived a terribly sheltered life. Certainly not a conventional upbringing—as though she herself had one even remotely resembling “conventional”—but to presume curiosity would not provide some knowledge of human matters is ridiculous. _Necessary_ , because she needed to know what she was dealing with.

Unfortunately, _that_ part of her inquiry remains unanswered. She wonders, silently, if she can let herself make more assumptions, believe that he’s just talking a big game and really hasn’t the faintest idea, and that between them, she is the only one with any real knowledge. Knowledge built upon for too many prior years, when her identity was a coy smile in sinfully-red lipstick, exotic features highlighted and placed on blatant display for hungering eyes, and naked flesh wrapped invitingly in sheets, awaiting her prey with the leisurely prowess of a panther.

She was a pretty face, then. In later years, when his world and hers abruptly collided in a subway tunnel, she was the iron-jawed, ice-cold huntress with no mercy and no weaknesses. She was a soldier, robotic in demeanor, ruthless in nature. The coy temptress had no place in that time.

So what is she now? A creature of shadows, of the night, of black leather, draped in a hood to cloak features that might betray her as something beautiful, something desirable, something feminine. A mysterious being keeping stranger company, sweeping out of the darkness, attacking with silent fury. A vigilante, of sorts, who defends the innocent by unleashing every last drop of rage, resentment, and betrayal until her soul is wrung dry, body spent and mind exhausted. Then she returns to the normal world, alone, takes in sights and smells, all the while assaulted by memories that refill the vat of ugliness. And it begins again.

Her eyes drift from his brooding shape to the mirror. A woman stares back at her. This woman wears no makeup, no pretty eyes or red lips to make her attractive or appealing. She wears scrapes across one cheek, an intersecting cut through her left eyebrow with dried blood trickled down to her jaw, a set of five smaller cuts along the other cheek, and a small bruise on the underside of her jaw. Her hair hangs loose in a fringed veil around her face, across her eyes, and down her shoulders. Her green eyes are sharp. They burn with wanting, with an unfulfilled need, and she doesn’t remember another time when they ever were. Dull, hollow, empty, cold: her eyes have been all of those, sometimes all at once. But never this. Never so full of need and want and a desire to _be alive_.

She almost doesn’t dare believe the woman in the mirror is her. But when she reaches a hand upwards and presses fingertips to her cheek, the woman does the same. When she pushes both hands through that dark mass of hair, the woman does the same. After her hands slowly peel away layer after layer, dropping each one to the side until none remain, the woman stands naked. Her body is covered with new bruises and old scars, the same Karai has seen many a time with downward glimpses at her own flesh. Tonight, though, she does not glimpse. She stares, and examines, and studies.

Hers is a body of lean lines and sharp angles in place of elegant feminine curves. Hers is not a body men actively seek out for wanting, but she possesses a keen mind, cunning when it must be, and knows how to make men forget her lacking beauty, even if only for a couple short hours in bed. Her eyes and mind break a man apart in simple calculations, uncovering weaknesses and fantasies with surgical precision. She knows how to make men scream. She knows how to make them lose consciousness. She knows how to make their bodies numb from pleasure, while her own has been numb to the pleasures of a man’s touch since nearly the beginning, because her mind found no such delight. Calm, calculated execution of a mission: those are her bedroom conquests. She knows nothing else.

“Thanks for the bode of confidence in my self-control, Sunshine,” Raph’s voice suddenly rumbles from the far corner, deeper than before and laced with something she recognizes, has heard before many times, but now, for the first time, sends a violent rush of heat through her veins, “but now’s not the time to test me. Put something on before I’m not responsible for myself.”

_Oh God…_ when in the hell has that kind of promise left her physically immobile? Men—human men, young and old; some aged and wrinkled, others with smooth skin and dark eyes and perfectly formulated features and forms—have said utterly filthy things to her, the kind of things glamorized in adult films as being provocative and erotic. They’ve wanted to do things to her that would make even a seasoned lady of the night blush furiously. No one has ever told her to put her clothes back on, because the sight of her naked—and not just naked, but vulnerable and open and not even trying to be seductive—is pushing his control over the brink. No one.

“I find it hard to believe you would ever surrender control over your actions.” She says, not making one attempt to clothe herself, but instead turning to face him, to give him an uninhibited view. “Your father must have taught you better than that.”

She’s walking on thin ice, to say the least. His eyes find her, and suddenly the seven feet of distance between them simultaneously feels like too much and not enough. His gaze has been ablaze before, with the thrill of a fight and the rush of adrenaline pumping through his veins, but right now, it’s an inferno and she is burning alive under its scrutiny.

“Sensei didn’t prepare us for everything.” He says, after several long minutes of tension curling silently in the air. She knows he isn’t lying, or hiding any truth from her, because he’s looking at like someone who has always glimpsed a desired prize from afar, wanting in secret, and to now have the complete vision bared before him is setting the world off-kilter.

“Does it frighten you?” she whispers, fingers clenching at her sides. “To be without control? To be so weak, helpless, vulnerable? To have surrender be the only option?”

“Not as much as it’s freaking _you_ out, Sunshine.”

_Does he **have** to be so perceptive?_ “Look, Tough Guy,” she snaps, finally grabbing her robe off the closet door and burying herself within its protective, well-worn folds, “you can say you _know what that means_ and play the part, but the fact remains, _I_ ’m the one who has been in bed after bed and had all different types between my legs. Not _you_.”

“Oh, really?” he retorts; she doesn’t fail to see the irony in this: not two minutes ago, she was standing naked in front of him, half a step away from tossing caution to the wind, and now they’re snapping at each other with barely a hint of good humor, “Well, since you’re the Guru on this whole deal, why don’t you start by explaining why someone with all that experience is hiding like a little girl? I didn’t exactly say I hated the view.”

“You told me to put my clothes back on.” She growls, one hand clenching in the neckline. Frayed threads brush between her fingers, a reminder of how old this thing is, how many seasons of life it has carried her through, close as a dear friend and the only thing she couldn’t leave behind.

“ _Before_ I put you up against the wall, Sunshine. Before I touched you and kissed you and let myself pretend I wasn’t a _freak_ for once.” The vicious emphasis on his words cuts through the air between them, and she feels her legs buckle as if he’d physically struck her.

“You…” her voice sounds softer, a child’s whisper instead of anything with real conviction, “…You aren’t a freak.”

“Sorry. You’re right.” His glare diverts to the cracked window, as if it alone is responsible for all his troubles in life. “ _Specimen_ is the better word.”

It’s not like she deluded herself into pretending this unaddressed issue would never rear its ugly face again, but the sting is especially harsh, notably cold, and her fingers dig deeper into the well-worn fabric. “You’ve never asked for an apology.” She slowly finds her voice, albeit by dragging it up her throat and flinging it past her lips. “And you know I won’t give one. I was doing what I was told. What I thought was—”

_Best? Right?_ Who is she even kidding? She didn’t think that was “best” for anybody and it certainly didn’t classify as “the right thing to do”. Those were her orders, and she was a soldier. Soldiers follow orders. End of story.

In the time it takes her to blink, he’s on her: in her face, in her space, and she’s backed up against the wall in a prison of muscled limbs and concrete. She doesn’t think he’ll actually hurt her, not to the extent that his smoldering glare suggests, but she’s not confident enough to hold true to such an assumption.

The thought hits her, half a second before he kisses her, that he could be the only one in existence that can _destroy_ her.

The kiss isn’t awkward or clumsy; he’s learned a little too well from the last couple times she kissed him and taught him to respond. He doesn’t let her return as much as he takes over the kiss, and she can either stand perfectly motionless or grab hold and come along for the ride. She chooses the second option, clutching at his arms with shaking hands and returning the kiss with less finesse and more urgency. His skin is rough, chaffing her palms and fingertips; the cut across his upper and lower lip, the one that has often fascinated her in silent moments, nicks her mouth with each kiss, like the dull edge of a knife. The metallic tinge of blood teases her tongue.

Then he pulls away, too quick, too abrupt, and she feels ice in her veins. And she wonders if this is her punishment, some retribution or cruel trick of Fate, for having such lackluster principles and absolutely no moral center for nearly all entire twenty-five years of life.

“No one’s here giving orders now, Karai.” He says; this time, hearing her name brings heat pooling in her gut and melts away the fear frozen in her blood. “No one’s pulling your strings or pushing you one way or another. Haven’t been for months. All the months we’ve been doing this, building this, whatever the hell _this_ is, it’s just been us. You and me. It’s no different now. And you ain’t gonna like what I’m about to say, but I’m still saying it and you can either swallow it or spit it back. Either way, I’ll know your answer.”

She thinks this might actually be a worse punishment than a quick tease. She can’t know the exact words about to come out of his mouth, but she suspects, and if she’s right…if she’s even _partially_ right…

“No one outside of this room knows about us. At least not by my doing.” There’s a blatant accusation in there, but she holds his gaze with all the determination possible to muster and lets her expression testify for itself. “And if the day comes—like it probably will, because secrets don’t live long in this world—when my brothers find out, there’ll be hell to pay and Leo will chew my ass for a month. He’ll probably rip me a new one over and over, about me forgettin’ who you are and what you did and all that crap. Truth is, I haven’t forgotten a damn thing. I remember it every day. I remember it whenever I look at you or hear your voice. Problem is, I’ve managed to fall for you over my own two stupid feet so many times that I stopped caring.”

It occurs to her that neither hand has moved from his shoulder, when her fingers slowly curl inward and press against the rough, scaled texture of his skin. Foreign. Alien. Reptilian. And yet… “Raphael—”

“—And unless you stop me in the next five seconds,” he continues, bulldozing over whatever was about to come out of her mouth, “you’re gonna see just how hard I fell for you, woman. You’re gonna see what it does to me when you’re tossing me sass or giving me attitude, or when you’re busting a guy’s jaw up five different ways and breaking bones people didn’t even know they had. I don’t do words, and I don’t do all that sappy, emotional, sugary bull, so you can be plenty sure I’m honest as a God-damn saint when I tell you this.”

Her stomach drops like a lead weight, but every nerve in her body is tingling and on edge and if someone or something happens to walk in or make a scene outside or ring her phone off the hook, she’ll kill them. Plain and simple, she’ll kill them. Dead on arrival.

“I don’t know what the hell we’ve got between us.” He says, and she couldn’t agree more. “Could be something special; could be as romantic as an addict needing a fix. Whatever it is, it blows my mind every time we’re together, it drives me crazy when we’re not, and I’ve been flat on my face in it and because of it enough times that I’ll just say I’m crazy about you—might even be in love with you—because right about now, it’s as close to making sense of it as I can get. And it feels pretty damn close to the truth.”

Karai lets the air settle between them, even if only for a moment, and then releases a slow, careful breath. Something that vaguely resembles laughter trails on her tongue. “For someone who isn’t big with words,” she says, fingers going for the knot in her belt and calmly yanking it apart, “you don’t know when to shut up.”

She kisses him this time: hard, fast, demanding everything from him in return. He gives her that, kissing with the same force and wild recklessness with which he fights. One hand jerks the robe from her shoulders and tosses it across the room; the other grabs her around the waist and hoists her against the wall. The solid planks of his thighs settle under her, supporting her balance, and her knees press firmly into both sides. She can feel the hard ridges of his shell against her calves. His hands are all over her, from hips to shoulders and back down again. One dares a touch beneath her left breast, and her nerves split under the electrified current. She momentarily forgets to breathe. _One touch…_ how could one touch do that to her?

He pulls back at her violent quiver, not enough to drop her but enough to meet her gaze. She could be deluding herself, but he seems just as taken-aback by the rapid change in their circumstances as she is. She slides a hand slowly upwards, from his shoulder to the side of his neck, fingers playing lightly over a pulse that hammers against the skin, and a groan rumbles past his clenched jaw. “We doing this?”

It seems a straightforward question, but she hears so many more, layered atop it and beneath it, wrapped up in its syllables. And she’s suddenly a little girl again, standing on a rooftop in some filthy back alley, gazing down to a busy city street with only a solitary metal rail halfway between her and a violent death. Perched on a dare, with so many eyes on her, this rail-thin wisp of a street-orphan, with odds stacked high against her and a greater certainty of death than survival, because it would take incredible skill and concentration to catch hold of that rail at precisely the right time, and even more determination to keep hold and not toss herself to the asphalt below. The choice was black and white, brutally honest, mercilessly clear: Jump, or retreat.

She jumped then. She jumps now.

“Damn straight.” She whispers. It is a liberating sensation.

***

The first man whose bed she shared was, to be polite, at least fifteen years her senior, more focused on spending his money than maintaining any kind of healthy lifestyle, and spent far too much time fondling her with clammy hands, in highly uncomfortable and awkward gestures. She took three showers when it was done, scrubbed her skin red, and soaked in another bath with soothing salts, just to get the feel of his hands cleaned away. Then she’d gone down to the dojo and beat one of the bags until it split open and spilled tiny pellets all over the floor.

Raphael is, by no means, a gentle and tender lover. He’s hands pressing firm into her flesh, running unchecked across her limbs without pattern, without rhyme or reason but a pure urgency to just touch her. He’s a lipless mouth marking paths along her throat, nipping here and there in a way that sparks her nerves. He’s iron-rod muscle and dry skin and heat, pressed flush to her with barely a breath between them. When they finally make it to the bed, he’s an unmovable force, indomitable, untamed and uncontained, wrapping her in his shadow as effortlessly as he does his arms. 

She’s had men who could be sweet and compassionate, who were a gentleman in bed and wanted her to stay for pillow talk afterward. Raphael isn’t that, and she’s not sure he could be even if he tried. She’s grateful for it. Right now, just as when they’re on the street, side by side, he treats her like an equal. Like someone who can handle bruises and scars and walk away stronger for it. The fact he happens to be making her head spin while doing it is just an extra incentive.

“Do it.” She hisses, when the teasing presses on a few minutes too many and every nerve is on fire, shrieking for more; when there is a dull throb building at the back of her head and a far more violent throb between her legs; when her mind is lost to the kind of wanting that can shatter windows and demolish walls and, for all she cares, break the bed into a thousand pieces. The kind of wanting that wants his hands running through her hair and clutching at her skin hard enough to leave marks for a week; that wants him, inside her, shattering her apart so thoroughly that she might have a prayer of creating something new. Something beautiful.

She does, indeed, feel like she’s breaking apart; being demolished, unhinged, dismantled, with every move he makes, inside her, around her, against her. Tears prick her eyes, but they’re not from pain. These tears are from relief: simple, overwhelming, earth-shattering relief. For the first time, she feels alive. She hears the blood rushing through her ears and feels the pain of developing bruises and drowns in the kind of pleasure that someone like her was most definitely never meant to feel.

She feels real. She feels human. She feels…

…loved.

***

“Never pegged you for a cuddler.” He smirks, somewhere near her hairline. One arm is draped over her waist; the other hand is loosely dragging through her hair, which must be a colossal mess right now.

“Guess you have a few things left to learn.” She retorts. He’s not wrong; she most definitely is _not_ the cuddling type, and she’ll end anyone who suggests otherwise. But when she’s pressed close to him, cheek tucked against his shoulder, hands playing idly across his chest, and he has her pulled especially close without any resistance on her part, she supposes there isn’t another way to phrase it other than “cuddling”.

It’s not so bad. It’s actually kind of nice.

From his chest, her hands slowly migrate upwards, mapping the formations of his muscles, his skin, his scars. One hand dares further, gliding across his shoulders and finding the protected flesh where the shell is molded free of his body. He tenses against her, but he doesn’t snap for her to stop, nor does he physically rip her hand away. She traces fingertips there, feeling the skin out with curiosity. It feels soft, almost silken in texture, and much thinner than the rest of his thickly-scaled flesh.

“You said I wasn’t a freak.” He mumbles, still not forcing her away. “Change your mind yet?”

“No.”

“Pretty quick to respond on that one.”

Now, she uses the hand on his shoulder to shove him backwards, into the sheets, and lazily mounts his hip with one bare leg. “I don’t mince words when I’m telling the truth, you brat.”

“That a new experience for you?” he smirks up at her. “Telling the truth?”

It is. But damned if she’ll give him the satisfaction. “Do you ever feel like doing something with your mouth other than smarting off?”

His smirk broadens; it should be illegal for him to look that unbelievably sexy when he’s being a smug little brat. “Got something in mind, babe?”

_Babe._ Okay. Okay, yes. She could get used to that. She could get very, very, _very_ used to it. “As a matter of fact…” she tosses her mussed hair over one shoulder and thoroughly enjoys the way his eyes drink in the view all over again, “I’ve got a few.”

Enough to get them through this night, and then some. Consequences be damned.


End file.
